After reading an article about how to make three foot flames with strawberry pop-tarts and a toaster, I went out and bought a cheap toaster at walmart for about 6 dollars.
After a few months, the toaster was still sitting new and in the box in my room - since I hadn't yet tried to replicate the pop-tart experiment. In fact, I'd entirely forgotten it. Then, one morning I was eating breakfast and my mother complained that our toaster had stopped working. I overheard the complaints and piped up: "hold on, I've got a new toaster in my room." My siblings and parents were a little surprised to hear this and didn't really believe me until I came up a few moments later with a brand new toaster still in the box. We plugged it in and it worked fine - in fact, we've used it ever since and haven't had a single problem with it.
At the time this situation was pretty amusing...my family spent quite some time trying to figure out why I happened to have a brand new toaster in my room.
